THE FOURTH SITTING
They turned the light off and sat down in silence. Then Julian said:
"Keep your hands well away from mine, Val."
"I will."
They had not been sitting for five minutes before Valentine felt that the atmosphere was becoming impregnated with a certain heaviness of mystery, with a certain steady and unyielding dreariness hanging round them like a cloud. They were once again confronted by a strange reality. Surely they were. Valentine felt it, silently knew it.
In this blackness he seemed at length to step forward and to stand upon the very threshold of an abyss, beyond which, in vague vapours, lay things unknown, creatures unsuspected hitherto. From this darkness anything might come to them, angel or devil, nymph or satyr. So, at least, he dreamed for a while, giving his imagination the rein. Then, in a revulsion of feeling, he jeered at his folly, mutely scolded his nerves for spurring him to such flagrant imbecilities.
"This is all nonsense," he told himself, "all fancy, all a world created, peopled, endowed with life by my desirous mind, which longs for a new sensation. I will not encourage this absurdity. I will be calm, cold, observant, discriminating. This is the same darkness in which every night I sleep, with no sense of being surrounded by forms which I cannot see, pressed upon by the denizens of some other sphere, not that in which I breathe and live."
He deliberately detached himself from his mood of keen expectation, and ardently resolved to anticipate nothing. And at this moment the table began to shift along the carpet, to twist under their hands, to rap, to tremble, and to pulsate, as if breath had entered into it. Like some live animal it stirred beneath their pressing fingers.
"It is beginning," Julian whispered.
"Animal magnetism," Valentine murmured.